The Last Samurai a review by Alan Farrell

Directed by Edward Zwick.  Starring… You’re kidding?  You don’t know?  Well, everybody else does!   …along with Ken Watanabe (See if you can guess who’s he playing), Billy Connolly (See if you can guess who’s he playing), and a bunch of Japanese guys with funny hairdos but whose names you can’t hope to pronounce. 

Movies with “Last” in the title:  Last Man Standing; Last of the Red Hot Lovers; Last of the Blonde Bombshells, The Last Picture Show (By the bye, what was “the last picture show”?* ); Last of the Mohicans (By the way, who was “the last of the Mohicans”?**); About Last Night; The Last Mile; The Last Tango in Paris; The Last Temptation of Christ; The Last Time I Saw Paris; Save the Last Dance for Me;  The Last Train from Gun Hill (By the bye, when was “the last train from Gun Hill”?***); L’année dernière à Marienbad (variously pronounced); Clash of the Titans; Class of ’44 (Forty-Four); Blast from the Past; LA Story. 

Dances with Samurai.  See if this sounds familiar:  scruffy guy, weary of war—the Civil War specifically—and who’s seen too much, stumbles out West (waaaaaaaay the heck out West), meets up with some roughies, whom he takes to heart, and decides upon a last stand in their company amid hopeless odds against ironically… the forces of order!  Dances with Wolves?  Open Range?  Butch and Sundance?  Tootsie? 

Try reading the paper from back to front sometime.  All those American flags on the pages just before that ad for  DWM, 5’ 5” 285 lbs., seeking SWF same for long walks, Big Band music, unmasculine European coffee, macramé, and novels about shorebirds?  Those are dead guys who served under the colors. Not a day goes by when two, three… more of them don’t check out, dumb farmboys from this (or some other) valley flung ashore on Kwajalein, Peleliu, Saipan, Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Buna; shot down over Wake, Truk, Vela la Cava, Rabaul, New Georgia; dumped into the water off Bungo Strait, Ironbottom Sound, the Coral Sea, the Java Sea, Leyte Gulf, and on and on.  Those guys’ll rest easy knowing we finally managed to resurrect the venerable  bushido (pronounced “bushy-toe,” I think), Code of the Samurai Warrior, and moo beneficently over its passing while we snarfle down popcorn at the Cineplex.  In the last real life picture of a samurai sword  I can remember a Japanese officer is swinging it to lop off the head of an unarmed Marine on Makin Island.  

Now we’re reliably—and lyrically—informed  that these guys were actually sensitive agents of  virtue, equality, safe sex, clean air, and culture—a culture that seems to involve a lot of yowling, whacking each other with a stick, living in paper houses, wearing dresses (men), and eating with knitting needles, for what I can see, but, hey—and that we should weep for their passing.  A couple of them actually tear up on the screen… and I think I saw one or two fingers fuss furtively about eyes among the audience as we cleared the theater after this film.  One of the few cogent lines in The Last Samurai, one tossed in scorn at the protagonist, Nathan Algren, Medal of Honor winner and wanna-be Taoist, invites him to consider “Why it is you hate your own people so?”  Might ask that out in Californie. 

Anyhow.  Algren (Tom Cruise, with a mop of oily black hair but a splotchy beard, signal he’s in his ac-toor mode and to take this dreck seriously, okay?  Born on the Fourth, Magnolias.) has washed up in a Wild West show (after service with honor in the Late Unpleasantness and service without it in the butchery of the Plains Wars), where former commanding officer Benjamin Bagley (Tony Goldwyn, an irritating Lieutenant Colonel who you just know is gonna take a thumping before it’s over) finds him and “dragoons” him (urf  urf:  He’s a cavalryman, get it?) and his Irish sergeant into coming to Japan to “modernize” (read:  “poison with middlebrow American—ptui!—values,” beyond which Hollywood is light years… uh… beyond which.)  In the first scrap, though, Algren’s trainees break and run, he’s captured, and dragged off to the mountain village lair of Quasimodo, Lord of the Samurai, where Algren undergoes a Hollywood indoctrination in the Way of the Warrior, the Way of Zen, the Way of The Sensitive Guy Who Seeks the Perfect Blossom, the Way of the Gringo Who Gets Whacked with a Stick.  The soul-weary Algren sops this stuff up, wins over the villagers—mostly through his stoic capacity to take a good stick-whacking—and in the end takes up the samurai’s sacred mission to unfrutz the boy Emperor,  endeavor they propose to pull off by tricking the Emperor’s army into killing them all.  Well, who dies and who doesn’t, who retrieves his Karma and who doesn’t, who does the comely but demure Taka (played by the comely but demure Koyuki, or maybe the other way around) and who doesn’t, who finds the Perfect Blossom and who doesn’t I leave to you to learn in the dark at Cinema 12.  

This is a great flick and one to watch again; a great role for Cruise, who’s getting just about old enough, just about confident enough in his craft to persuade me he is soul-weary.  But that’s  precisely my beef:  the visual sumptuousness of the flick tends to foist off the message on us… that bygone men were grander, bygone ages brighter, bygone values sturdier.  Watch this thing. Just don’t fall for it.  Your kid in Iraq, the one in the chocolate-chip-cookie suit, the one you thought would never graduate… is brighter, tougher, cooler than ever  my buds or I. 

*  Last Picture Show:  Howard Hawks’ Red River, of course.

** Chingachgook (variously spelt but pronounced “Chicago,” according to Mark Twain) after Uncas takes swandive off cliff.

***  2100h (or 9 o’clock at night, whichever comes first).  af

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"Your kid in Iraq, the one in the chocolate-chip-cookie suit, the one you thought would never graduate… is brighter, tougher, cooler than ever my buds or I.'  Nah.  Alan is a schoolteacher who loves his warrior cubs.  In fact, your kid is just another grunt.   Men like your son were counted among Marius' mules.  God bless him, but my boys were better.  pl

Comments

[William R. Cumming]

Watching Japan (modern Japan) suffer through its second nuclear holocaust is no fun. Watching the sumptous scenery of the Last Samurai was fun. Also like the capturing in RAN and other Kuroshawa movies. But hey for pre-WWII Japan prefer all those comely Chinese actresses in something like the "Last Geisha"! The MEJI [sic} restoration has largely been a disaster for the Japanese people IMO!

And flatly predict that Japan in its weakened status will end its post WWII relationship with the USA. And by the way Japan has quite a lot of plutonium. And rockets.

And now even in Tokyo they are monitoring the food for radiation.

Watching a great people commit SEPEKU is not fun. Neither is watching the Japanese do so.

[Swampy]

Eagerly awaiting the review of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One.

[William R. Cumming]

And Alan do you have a favorite Jeanne d'Arc?

[optimax]

"That's why God gave you two." One tough cookie.

[Fred]

Alan, package received. Return cargo in route. Thanks, hope it keeps the ink flowing.

Fred

[The Twisted Genius]

Terrific review. I liked the movie, too. There are scenes that I can watch over and over and still enjoy them. I also liked the old miniseries version of "Shogun." Pilot Major Blackthorne... that's one of the coolest name-rank combinations I've ever heard. The cultural issues (if that's what you call boiling a captured sailor) are handled in a less fawning fashion in "Shogun." I guess we have James Clavell to thank for that.

[YT]

"Why it is you hate your own people so?"

When I was an adolescent (have I really ever left that period behind with my constant ogling of young nubile wenches?), I was very much like that old dude from Crete. --

Κρῆτες, ἀεὶ ψευδεῖς, κακὰ θηρία, γαστέρες ἀργαί.

"The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox

Contempt bred from (over-)familiarity.

[YT]

Brig. Farrell, sir,

Only Hollywood could pull this one off with (MOST!) excellent(!) movie soundtrack.

Imagine the French trying to re-enact the past.

(The protagonist was one of them frogs, as I mentioned in one of the Col.'s posts).

[Medicine Man]

I also liked The Last Samurai. In fact, this one is in my collection. Once again, I pretty much agree with your take on the flaws in this film. The film has a certain subterranean vein of moralizing in it, wherein the samurai are romanticized and westerners are rounded up to being morally suspect. This aspect of the film I suspect is a feature of the type of story being told, a pretty shopworn Hollywood yarn when you get down to it. As you point out, the plot is quite similar to Dances with Wolves (or if you want to get your sci-fi on, Avatar).

That said, I didn't find any of these things ruined the movie for me. The stagecraft was good, the scenery excellent, and the acting more than adequate. I'm a sucker for a dramatic last stand and Last Samurai has one of those. It also has a pretty good ninja's vs samurai medieval combat scene that I think I could watch repeatedly.

Another fine review, Mr. Farrell.

[Fred]

YT

"Imagine the French trying to re-enact the past"

I saw a French movie version of Napoleon's return from Elba, only no one was there to meet him! Charming film about his taking over one of the arrodonsements in Paris. Very entertaining. (wish I could remember the title).

[Stephanie]

I never believed in Cruise for a minute as a battle tested soldier who’s spent years drinking himself insensible to deaden the pain – with his Cover Girl complexion and unlined face, he’s just too pampered to make you believe that he’s been through any kind of hell. It’s like watching Johnny Depp as Dillinger. (Cruise’s acting per se isn’t bad, though.) And the movie’s view of Katsumoto’s fanatical Emperor-worship glorifies exactly the kind of mentality that brought Japan to disaster a century or so down the pike. But the movie is beautiful to look at and I especially liked the first fight, when the samurai materialize out of the forest mists like a nightmarish medieval vision in front of Cruise’s terrified peasant recruits. It wasn’t Kurosawa but it was pretty good.

Also note that director Edward Zwick plagiarized himself – the scene where Cruise demonstrates the unreadiness of his men for fighting by having one man shoot and reload while Cruise fires away next to his ears to rattle him is just like a scene in “Glory” where Matthew Broderick pulled the same number on poor Jihmi Kennedy.

[YT]

Fred,

I seem to have unwittingly belittled our friends on the other side of the Atlantic (awkward, yours truly being a francophile & all).

Could you recommend any other films directed by Frenchmen (Luc Besson didn't make any historical flicks, or did he?)